Late Lunch at cafe Mogodor

Went into the city today, to meet with Nick Porcaro. I met him at this years SIGGRAPH Conference during a presentation on Open Source software. He is working with painter / graphic designer Ellen Levy, who joined us briefly for coffee, and is investigating ways to turn these paintings into 3D objects using Blender. He is a musician and has been working with her before, combining his music with her painting(s). An interesting project that will not be easy to pull off: how do you add a third dimension to a broad brush stroke, with a method that should be semi-automated?

I am not really doing anything in Blender at the moment, since I am working on my animation in Softimage XSI and teaching a course using Lightwave (the image accompanying this post I created in Lightwave to show UV Texturing). But I will be attending the Blender New York Conference next weekend, at least Saturdays sessions (The big conference is this weekend in Amsterdam). One of the issues I run into when teaching 3D (or any other computer based course actually) is the access student have to the software. Using open source software, like Blender, would eliminate this problem, since all students can install it on their own machines. I know students are really good at getting their hands on software, but this would actually be legal! Downside: the documentation on open source software usually su... is often not all that good. Not to speak of the GUI issues. But in both respects Blender is actually not half bad. For open source software.